With the final emphatically successful game in a triumphant season, yesterday was a time for unreserved celebration in Post Office Road, home of Featherstone Rovers – an appropriately unassuming address for the small and unprepossessing mining town that gave birth to the team. Featherstone was a place that so exemplified the kind of community where every part of life revolved around mining that in the 1950s three visiting sociologists chose it for a study called Coal is Our Life. So the closure of its last pit in 1985 drained it of much of its purpose, depriving it not just of its main source of work, but also of its principal engine of social cohesion and pride. Yet it still had the Rovers, a team that, despite meagre resources, repeatedly took on and humbled such titans of rugby league as Wigan, St Helens, Bradford and Leeds, reaching five Wembley cup finals and winning three. Yesterday's 72-20 trouncing of Barrow Raiders confirmed their status as champions of the game's second division. In some sports, even those now as glitzy as soccer, winning the second division would guarantee you a place in the first. But here that is no longer the case. In 1996 the game was redesigned in search of Sky money, and now Featherstone's ground is judged too small and too dated and its crowds too thin to meet the criteria for a place in the Super League. The commercial modernisation of rugby league has crushed its ambitions. But as yesterday showed, it can't crush the pride.